Update: New Projects and Procrastination

Hey folks, after another unplanned leave of absence I figured it was about time I updated you on what I’ve been doing and maybe lay out a rough plan for the coming months. I’ve been busy with all manner of things, different projects involving music, podcasting, audio production, web design, programming and open source geekery. I can’t actually fill you in on all of the upcoming projects quite yet as I’m not actually allowed to, how mad is that? hehehe 🙂 Don’t worry I haven’t signed an NDA or anything but we’re waiting for things to reach a more advanced stage before making any announcements. I can say it’s a podcast production gig which I’m very excited about and it will relate to open source software, should be of great interest to readers of this blog I hope. Ok I’ll stop teasing, details soon I promise. So, onto things I can actually talk about, that would be a good idea.

I’ve been trying out Clonezilla lately to back up my laptop and create images. It’s a great piece of open source software and I like it a lot. The live cd is very useful and I found backing up to an external USB hard disk a lot quicker and easier than I’d expected. The reason for all this backing up and preparation is I want to get back into distro hopping again on my main machine and writing a lot more about it. The distro reviews have tailed off in the last few months I know. It was around this time last year I began a process of distro hopping and reviewing which made this blog a lot more popular that I could ever have imagined and also led to some paid writing work which was much appreciated. I figured it’s time to get cracking again. The summer is over and the nights are drawing in so what better to do on a cold winter night than get down to some serious writing… ok I can think of a few things but they’re not really suitable for this blog post.

As always the Linux Outlaws podcast has been going from strength to strength and we’ve been cranking out episodes like crazy. We were very lucky to have Steve McIntyre the Debian Project Leader join us for an interesting chat on episode 57. I’ve really enjoyed interviewing people actually and even been told I’m not half bad at it so I look forward to doing much more of this in future. Fab has also migrated the Linux Outlaws website off my server now to a new one in the last week or so. It was his suggestion but it’s worked out quite well for me as I’m getting more involved in hosting sites for people, it takes quite a strain off. It’s fair to say it’s come at a good time.

I also have various other music and open source projects on the go as always, I’m keeping busy but I think we’re pretty much up to date. I’ll fill you in on those in installments I think as this post is getting very long already. Gotta save something for next time and hopefully increase the post volume again. It looks likely I will be in London in a couple of weeks to attend the Linux Expo which is very exciting. I’ll let you know more about that when I find out the details myself but I can’t wait to catch up with friends in the big smoke. In the meantime I’ll be downloading a few different Linux distros and going on my travels again. The new releases of Fedora and Ubuntu are both around the corner so it’s time I explored a little more. I got comfortable and complacent on Linux Mint in the last couple of months, it’s a nice distro and I like it but it’s time to get into action again. More about this soon…

Thanks for reading, take care of yourselves and I’ll speak to you soon

Mandriva 2009 is looking really slick, I installed it on the date of release and have had no complaints so far. I’m trying to use the KDE tools mostly as to not rock the boat to hard but everything really stable!

Funny you should say that I just downloaded the Mandriva 2009 iso 2nite, I really liked 2008 when I reviewed it last year. Mandriva went off the boil for a bit I thought since the heady Mandrake days a few years back and I didn’t like 2006 or 2007 much but I found 2008 a real return to form. High hopes for 2009, can’t wait to try it out 🙂